A Screed on Sunday...

According to Jeff Jacoby in Sunday’s Globe, we are losing population in this state thanks entirely to the mere presence of the unquiet shade of Mike Dukakis and the looming prominence of Senator John Forbes Kerry.

This is Jeff at most mindless and wretched, ever willing to shill for corrupt and dying ideologies.
Careful there Jeff, dreckola like this will never get you enrolled in the pantheon of Big Think conservatives.

However, he has a point, Massachusetts is losing population, the fault though doesn’t lie with Jeff’s phantom bugaboo liberal statism, it is to say the least a complicated problem...too complicated for a Boston Globe column quite frankly.
For one thing, the Commonwealth has been ruthlessly de-industrialized nigh these past fifty years, wages and benefits have fled the state along with thousands of manufacturing jobs of all types. The mills that once dotted the Merrimac River are now drowsing in the heat down in Mexico.
We have been, to put it bluntly, looted by the false promise of lower wages and compliant workers elsewhere.
As a consequence of this, workers no longer make the sort of preemo wages to keep up with the cost of living. Faced with flattening wages, they shove off to Brockton or more likely utter hovels on South Policy Street in Salem N.H. (and blithely vote in democrat John Lynch for Governor of N.H. so their experience of Massachusetts’ liberalism couldn’t be all bad!).
Concurrent with the deindustrialization of Massachusetts has been its economic colonization. Most of the locally owned big employers have been bought up by out of state interests, thus money that once circulated the Commonwealth’s economy now inexorably flows out of state ne’er to return.
Which brings us to the Housing Bubble fueled by the High Tech bubble which in turn means a house in Menotomy that once sold for $25K in 1958 was was fit domicile for a mid level postal worker is now on the market for 800K.
Those wondrous high tech jobs don’t create much in the way of wage pressure from below...just ersatz stock options and the like.
So where do those postal workers & other wage earners live these days? In de facto shanties, condos or saltboxes in Brockton etc.
We’ve got systemic economic problems in Massachusetts that go beyond the rightical chic punditariat’s mental stagnation. Much of it starts with the cost of housing a problem few want to confront.
If we have a political problem it lies in the perpetuation of inept, craven, viceregal and amateurish GOP Governors with whom the forces of Progressivism and Good Common Sense must constantly negotiate.
Given all that it is a wonder things aren’t ten times worse.
Yesterday I posited the fall campaignwas going to revolve around health care and crime, let me add “home ownership” or something along those lines to that mix. Discussion of that issue will of itself automatically put the population decline on the agenda.

At all costs we must not allow the fall campaign to devolve into a pot banging session for some fiscally useless socially paralyzed ass-hole like Christy Mihos.
We must confront the problems of the hour, that is the only way in.